Recently it has been taking longer and longer to match for a live game, especially for the ~40min time settings.
I usually play around the same time but I need to plan ahead a bit to organise my time. So it’s all the more frustrating when I spend 20 mins of that time just waiting. So it got me thinking that perhaps other people would also like to set aside time slots to play.
The overall idea is to match for games that will actually happen in the future in a specific time slot.
The way I would use this is to schedule an auto-match for each time this week that I’m able to play. If I get there and I haven’t been matched, I can still try to wait and a game as normal, but hopefully I’d mostly jump straight in.
- For custom games it would be the same as usual except the game will have a start time, which could be a date in the future. Both players get an email reminder an hour beforehand.
- For auto-match, I can specify a set of times that I’m happy to play at, and if I’m prepared to play more than one game in that range. There is a calendar that shows slots where people want to play and I can choose to challenge that player (without seeing their identity).
- The time-ranges can be recurring, but I have to confirm after each game that I still want to keep the range open.
Another version of this is an automatch pool, which happens at certain pre-determined scheduled times. It’s a bit like a recurring tournament, but it’s just one auto-matched game. I can see how many people are already in the pool, the rank distribution and the scheduled start time. When the matching starts, people get matched in a best-effort way according to ranking, and then by the order they joined. All games start at once, to allow for re-matching if there are no-shows. If one person is left over at the end, they get put in the usual auto-match and are sent a sad face emoji.